Iceland

Iceland serves as a field of literary inquiry in Mortimer Cropper’s pursuit of Randolph Henry Ash: a place where the poet’s travel, the physical landscape, and poems shaped by Icelandic literature meet. Cropper’s journeys there give his scholarship a geographical, experiential dimension, even as his observations become part of a dispute over Ash’s work.

Ash’s Icelandic Connections

Cropper follows Ash’s tracks through Iceland, contemplating geysers and seething circles of hot mud alongside two works inspired by Icelandic literature. One is Ragnarök, an epic of Victorian doubt and despair; the other is Ask to Embla, a sequence of mysterious love lyrics. Though Ask to Embla appeared in 1872, Cropper considers that it was written much earlier, possibly during Ash’s courtship of Ellen Best. Iceland therefore connects Ash’s engagement with an inherited literary tradition to a chronology of composition that remains open to scholarly argument.

Cropper’s Expeditions and Scholarship

Cropper’s Icelandic journey formed part of a wider practice of retracing Ash’s major travels. He undertook these expeditions at different times rather than in the order Ash had made them, following opportunities as they arose. His familiarity with the Icelandic landscape came from travel and observation, not simply from reading Ash’s poems. Cropper later incorporated his research into his work on the poet, including his biography, The Great Ventriloquist.

Scholarly Dispute and Significance

Cropper’s observations became a point of disagreement with James Blackadder, who saw no reason to revise a note on Ask to Embla III in light of Cropper’s discoveries about the Icelandic landscape. The disagreement places Iceland at the intersection of material evidence and editorial interpretation: knowledge of a real landscape might inform a reading, but did not compel Blackadder to alter his account. In Cropper’s travels, the country is both a place encountered directly and a means of pursuing Ash’s poetic world; in the scholarly exchange, it becomes evidence whose significance remains contested.